The Future of Document Verification: Leveraging Blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identity for Enhanced Security and Transparency

TL;DR

The paper tackles the challenge of secure, transparent, cross-border document attestation by proposing a decentralized ecosystem that combines blockchain with self-sovereign identity (SSI) and verifiable/micro-credentials. It introduces an Attestation Chain that records non-confidential on-chain steps and culminates in an aggregate verifiable credential, supported by a DApp and SSI wallets to manage identities and credentials. The design emphasizes privacy-preserving data on-chain, controlled disclosure via verifiable credentials, and governance aligned with regulatory requirements. Future work includes security risk assessments, scalability testing, and a PoC to validate practicality and guide deployment in real-world settings.

Abstract

Attestation of documents like legal papers, professional qualifications, medical records, and commercial documents is crucial in global transactions, ensuring their authenticity, integrity, and trustworthiness. Companies expanding operations internationally need to submit attested financial statements and incorporation documents to foreign governments or business partners to prove their businesses and operations' authenticity, legal validity, and regulatory compliance. Attestation also plays a critical role in education, overseas employment, and authentication of legal documents such as testaments and medical records. The traditional attestation process is plagued by several challenges, including time-consuming procedures, the circulation of counterfeit documents, and concerns over data privacy in the attested records. The COVID-19 pandemic brought into light another challenge: ensuring physical presence for attestation, which caused a significant delay in the attestation process. Traditional methods also lack real-time tracking capabilities for attesting entities and requesters. This paper aims to propose a new strategy using decentralized technologies such as blockchain and self-sovereign identity to overcome the identified hurdles and provide an efficient, secure, and user-friendly attestation ecosystem.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Triangle of Trust for Verifiable Credentials
• Figure 2: Attestation Chain for a document submitted for authentication
• Figure 3: Proposed Architecture Diagram
• Figure 4: Flow of Information between Entities in Attestation Process
• Figure 5: Example Verifiable Credential containing micro-credentials of all the steps in the attestation chain.